Temporary

28 February 2014

The following was posted on the ANZAAB website.Conference in May'The most agreeable servants of civilization' Booksellers and Librarians in a Changing World

A Joint Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB) and the National Library of Australia.

Discussions and presentations on how the rare book trade operates, how libraries and booksellers can work together more effectively, a 'pop up' rare book fair, a display of some National Library of Australia treasures and tailored behind the scenes tours make for two unmissable days for anyone working with and with an interest in rare books, manuscripts and photographs.

This is the first time a conference such as this has been held in Australia. This conference will give participants the chance to meet others working with or interested in rare materials on paper while at the same time hearing from some foremost scholars, librarians and antiquarian booksellers. Not to be missed!

ANZAAB has also recently announced the 2014 Melbourne Rare Book Week from 17 to 27 July,
incorporating the 42nd ANZAAB Australian Antiquarian Book Fair from 25
to 27 July at Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne.

The following was posted on the ILAB website:

The Melbourne Rare Book Week is now well established in the City of
Melbourne’s event calendar. It is a major attraction for book
collectors, librarians and all who have a love of words, print on paper
and heritage, and the 2014 programme promises another outstanding event.

Kay Craddock on behalf of the Melbourne Rare Book Week Committee:

"To
date, we have attracted six new event partners from Melbourne’s
literary community and all of the 2013 partners have rejoined the
programme, making a total of 25. New partners are: The Library at the Dock
(due to open in Docklands in May), Grainger Museum, The Johnson Society
of Australia, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (Cowlishaw
Library), Royal United Services Institute of Victoria Library and the
Victorian College of the Arts.

The City of Melbourne has pledged
increased sponsorship funding and will work with us to promote our
events at its new Docklands Library. We have been extraordinarily
fortunate to engage the support of leading Consumer, Industry and Market
Research company, Roy Morgan Research. In addition to hosting several
individual events, Roy Morgan Research will be promoting the entire
programme through its extensive network of marketing, media, corporate,
institutional and government customers. On Monday March 17, Gary Morgan
and his CEO, Michele Levine, are hosting a media/sponsorship launch of
Melbourne Rare Book Week. This will be an opportunity for event partners
to promote the programme and to network with prospective sponsors and
journalists."

As part of the Melbourne Rare Book Week, the 42nd ANZAAB Australian
Antiquarian Book Fair will be held at the University of Melbourne's
historic Wilson Hall, with free admission to all visitors. The 2014 Book
Fair will again be held in partnership with the biennial University of
Melbourne Cultural Treasures Festival — a programme of free exhibitions,
thematic walks, talks, seminars, demonstrations, displays and guided
tours which showcase the University's rich array of museums and
collections.

[I will post this year's events when announced. Needless to say, I cannot wait!]

21 February 2014

Earlier this week the Royal Society announced the launch later this year of Royal Society Open Science,
an open access peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarly research in
all fields scientific and mathematical. The move is seen by the
Society’s president, Sir Paul Nurse, as a necessary step to keep pace
with the changing face of publishing in the twenty-first century.

Changes in the publishing field is something the Royal Society has
seen a lot of throughout its long history. The august body received a
Royal Charter to publish relevant works in 1662 (two years after its
official founding in November 1660), and will observe the 350th
anniversary of its journal Philosophical Transactions in March 2015.

With the recent open access announcement and next year’s anniversary of Philosophical Transactions in mind, this week’s post highlights the Royal Society’s two earliest books: John Evelyn’s Sylva and Robert Hooke’s Micrographia; first editions of each are held by University of Melbourne Special Collections.[1]

Sylva
First printed in 1664, Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber was the first work sponsored officially by the Royal Society and the first treatise in English dedicated entirely to forestry.[2]
Its author, John Evelyn (1620–1706), writer, intellectual and founding
member of the Royal Society, is perhaps best known for his long-running
diary kept from 1640 to 1706.

Evelyn initially presented Sylva as a paper to the Royal
Society in 1662. The published text sought to encourage tree-planting
after the destruction wrought by the Civil War and, it has been argued,
to ensure a supply of timber for England’s developing navy and add a
further boost to the economy. Evelyn’s bookproved highly
popular with its intended audience, namely the gentry and aristocracy,
who took from it the idea of gardening as an aesthetic pursuit, and his
discourse was positively received on the Continent where it stimulated
new methods of forest management.[3] Today Sylva is recognised as one of the most influential works on the subject of tree conservation.

First ed. title-page with the arms of the Royal Society

The first edition of Sylva contained two appendixes: Pomona: or, an Appendix Concerning Fruit-Trees in Relation to Cider, one of the earliest English essays on cider, and the Kalendarium Hortense: or, Gard’ners Almanac: Directing What He is To Do Monethly [sic] Throughout the Year, which was often reprinted separately and proved to be Evelyn’s most popular work.[4]

Title-page of Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense

Micrographia
The second text printed for the Royal Society was Robert Hooke’s groundbreaking Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses,
published in 1665. Hooke (1635–1703), a natural philosopher and
polymath, perfected the compound microscope and put the instrument to
good use. His observations touched on a number of subjects, from
combustion and diffraction of light, to fossils and artificial silk, and
his description of the honeycomb-like structure of a cork gave us the
word ‘cell’ to describe the basic biological unit of living organisms.

Micrographia is perhaps most widely known today for its
illustrations. The book includes 57 microscopic and 3 telescopic
observations, describing for the first time ‘a polyzoon, the minute
markings of fish scales, the structure of the bee’s sting [and wings],
the compound eyes of the fly, the gnat and its larvae, the structure of
feathers, the flea and the louse’.[5] These enlarged
images of such minute creatures (Hooke’s louse measures 45.7 cm in
length) are as startling today as they must have been for Hooke’s
contemporaries over 300 years ago.

Compound eye of the fly (Schema 24)

A flea (Schema 34)

A louse (Schema 35)

Like Sylva, Hooke’s Micrographia was an immediate
success. It was read by Samuel Pepys, who mentioned the book three times
in his diary for January 1664/5 and called it ‘the most ingenious book I
have ever read in my life’ (Pepys was also a member of the Royal
Society).[6] The text, particularly Hooke’s
observations on light and the spectrum, was also studied by Isaac Newton who
drew inspiration from it for his Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (London, 1704).

09 February 2014

Librarians are always pleased to hear about successes stemming from a user's research. Special collections librarians in particular are especially pleased when that research demonstrates the importance of the physical book.

I was very excited to learn that the 2012 edition of Milton's De Doctrina Christiana, edited by John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington and part of Oxford University's The Complete Works of John Milton series, recently received the John T. Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America.

The award is specified as being for: "A distinguished edition of Milton’s works, a distinguished bibliography (of his works or of studies of his life and works), a distinguished reference work, or a distinguished chapter on Milton in a monograph that concerns other authors or engages topics that bear on 17th-century England".John and Donald are both resident in Dunedin, New Zealand, and flew to Chicago last month to receive the award. Their edition of Milton's De Doctrina Christiana was many years in the making and drew heavily on local collections, including the Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection of the Dunedin City Library, where I was Rare Books Librarian from 2007 to 2013, and in which capacity I frequently saw Donald or John in the reading room, pencils, paper and magnifying glass on either side, and a folio-sized volume before them.
The book in question was the Dunedin copy of a Latin Bibleprinted in Hanau, Germany, by the Wechel printing firm in 1624 (OT, Apocrypha) and 1623 (NT), paid for by Daniel and David Aubry and Clemens Schleich.

In my congratulatory e-mail, I asked Donald about the importance of the collection, and the 1623/4 Bible in particular, to their work on Milton's De Doctrina:"The holdings of Dunedin Public Library were extremely useful to John and me throughout the nine years of our collaboration, especially since so much of this huge Milton work uses the Latin Bible of Junius-Tremellius-Beza, an excellent copy of which is permanently available in the Reed Collection.For the Old Testament and Apocrypha, the Latin wording of the 1623/4 Hanau [Bible] ... corresponds most closely with that of Milton’s citations, but in editing De Doctrina Christiana it was important to see where for reasons of his own he saw fit to change what Junius and Tremellius had written.

Also, for the New Testament the same [Bible] contains two Latin translations: Beza’s from the Greek and Tremellius’s from the Syriac. Although here Milton relied mainly on Beza’s own final version of 1598, he did occasionally prefer something in the posthumous ‘Beza’ edition of 1623; in some places, too, he opted for the quite different translation of Tremellius. And again, he sometimes decided to go his own way.

In all these respects the availability of the 1623/4 Bible helped John and me to produce a scholarly edition that showed in detail how Milton went about the task of dealing with the thousands of biblical passages included in his largest work".

For more, you can read John Hale's reflections on his experience co-editing Milton's De Doctrina on theOSEO blog (posted 30.07.13).---Testamenti Veteris Biblia Sacra ... (Hanoviae: Typis Wecheliansis, sumptibus Danielis ac Davidis Aubriorum, ac Clementis Schleichii, 1623/4); with the armorial stamp and bookplate of David Lindsay, 1st Lord Balcarres (1587-1642). Purchased from the Export Book Co., Preston, Lancashire, by the Dunedin Public Library with support from A. H. Reed in 1966.

About Me

Originally from the United States of America, I have worked in special collections and research libraries in Australasia since 2007. My present position is Curator of Rare Books and Fine Printing at the Alexander Turnbull Library/ National Library of New Zealand. This blog is my small contribution to fostering awareness of special collections in Australasia.